s" claimed priority to the
company already mentioned, but did not actually enter upon its New York
career until 1846. "Bryant's Minstrels" and Buckley's "New Orleans
Serenaders" were only two others of the most popular aggregations
featuring and burlesquing the Negro. In a social history of the Negro in
America, however, it is important to observe in passing that already,
even in burlesque, the Negro element was beginning to enthrall the
popular mind. About the same time as minstrelsy also developed the habit
of belittling the race by making the name of some prominent and worthy
Negro a term of contempt; thus "cuffy" (corrupted from Paul Cuffe) now
came into widespread use.

[Footnote 1: See Laurence Hutton: "The Negro on the Stage," in _Harper's
Magazine_, 79:137 (June, 1889), referring to article by Edmon S. Conner
in _New York Times_, June 5, 1881.]

This was not all. It was now that the sinister crime of lynching raised
its head in defiance of all law. At first used as a form of punishment
for outlaws and gamblers, it soon came to be applied especially to
Negroes. One was burned alive near Greenville, S.C., in 1825; in May,
1835, two were burned near Mobile for the murder of two children; and
for the years between 1823 and 1860 not less than fifty-six cases of the
lynching of Negroes have been ascertained, though no one will ever know
how many lost their lives without leaving any record. Certainly more men
were executed illegally than legally; thus of forty-six recorded murders
by Negroes of owners or overseers between 1850 and 1860 twenty resulted
in legal execution and twenty-six in lynching. Violent crimes against
white women were not relatively any more numerous than now; but those
that occurred or were attempted received swift punishment; thus of
seventeen cases of rape in the ten years last mentioned Negroes were
legally executed in five and lynched in twelve.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Hart: _Slavery and Abolition_, 11 and 117, citing
Cutler: _Lynch Law_, 98-100 and 126-128.]

Extraordinary attention was attracted by the burning in St. Louis in
1835 of a man named McIntosh, who had killed an officer who was trying
to arrest him.[1] This event came in the midst of a period of great
agitation, and it was for denouncing this lynching that Elijah P.
Lovejoy had his printing-office destroyed in St. Louis and was forced
to remove to Alton, Ill., where his press was three times destroyed and
where he finally met death